Not All Neocons Now

Think of the people on whom The Spectator could have called for comments on the situation in Egypt: Freddy Gray, Peter Oborne, Geoffrey Wheatcroft, John Laughland, Mark Almond, Anthony Daniels, Peter Hitchens, Neil Clark, Peregrine Worsthorne, Stuart Reid, Correlli Barnett, Daniel McCarthy, Taki and many more besides. Lord Lothian, the former Michael Ancram MP, is almost an Ed Husain figure, once of the Henry Jackson Society, but now articulating the classically High Tory opposition to Trident and support for dialogue with Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas and that creature of our own Foreign Office, the Muslim Brotherhood.

But instead, we get Neocons' Big Night Out, with Andrew Roberts, Anne Applebaum, Alistair Horne, Brendan Simms, Joshua Muravchik and Douglas Murray. Yes, Stephen Walt and Charles Glass, too. But even so. There and on other pages, the dominant voice is that of those who cheered on this country's worst foreign policy catastrophe in living memory, and who still want more of the same. In foreign policy, The Spectator seems to be mirroring the economic policy that caused R S Foster of Sheffield to bemoan on 27th November the view "that Britain can only remain Great by being the tax haven of choice for rootless cosmopolitan mountebanks of every sort", a view unbecoming in "a Tory magazine".

Thank heavens for Mehdi Hasan's New Statesman column, which brilliantly skewers the ludicrous fictions that we invaded Afghanistan or Iraq in order to "promote democracy", that opponents of the spread of democracy at the barrel of a gun were or are opposed to that spread itself, that events in Tunisia and Egypt vindicate what has been and is being done to Afghanistan and Iraq, that the neocons themselves have backed the uprising in Egypt, and that the Bush Administration was anything other than financially and otherwise supportive of Mubarak and of other Middle Eastern despots. "Are we all necons now? Of course not."

As for the n-word itself, yes, all supporters of the Iraq War were by definition neoconservatives, and vice versa. There were only neoconservative arguments for that war, and the neoconservative position could not have led anyone to oppose it.